The 2008 Readers' Choice Awards: Introducing Redmond's Triple Crown

To recognize the dynasties in our annual Readers' Choice competition, <i>Redmond</i> is introducing the "Triple Crown," a new award for products that have won (at least) three Readers' Choice honors in a row.

The number three is everywhere. Three strikes, three traffic lights, the three-ring circus -- they're all famous triads. For curious Googlers -- sorry, Microsoft, we mean MSN LiveSearchers, of course -- there's even a Web site called Threes.com that dedicates itself to all things triple.

Well, Threes.com can add a new entry to its list of trinities -- the Redmond Readers' Choice Triple Crown award, which honors products that have won (at least) three consecutive Readers' Choice Awards.

In fact, some of this year's winners have won four times in a row or more -- but for the purposes of the Triple Crown, we're only going back two years, to 2006.

A quick glance at this year's results shows that a majority of the product winners this year are taking home Redmond's Triple Crown. And that's why we invented it -- not because it's rare but because it's common. Winning a Readers' Choice Award is always an honor, but those products that win again and again deserve special recognition for staying on top in a competitive industry, and that's what the Triple Crown award and logo give them.

They have to stay on top in order to win it, though. The Triple Crown is for winners of three consecutive awards, not just for products that have won three times. And it doesn't go to ISV winners, either -- although being an ISV, or non-Microsoft, winner is still an important honor -- but only to those products that come out on top three times running.

And while there are a lot of Triple Crown winners this time around, every one of them will have to come out swinging next year in order to retain the award. A couple of two-time winners might just find themselves with a Triple Crown next year.

It's a huge upset for ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority application, which knocks off two competitors from Microsoft for its first-ever victory in this category. System Center

Operations Manager and Systems Management Server might have split the votes between them, giving Desktop Authority an opening, but ScriptLogic's product didn't fail to capitalize on the situation.

Users say they love it. Scott C. Davis, IT director for the College of Architecture, Design and Construction at Auburn University in Alabama, used Desktop Authority to untangle a nasty printing problem that involved sorting out printing rights for more than 2,500 users on more than 70 printers: "I'm the IT director, and I've got four people that report to me. I've got one person assigned to architecture, one assigned to industrial design and one to building science. It would take all four of us a day just to get the printing right-I'm doing it all now in a phone call and an e-mail."

With Desktop Authority, it's all about simplicity, says Tory Skyers, senior infrastructure engineer at Prudential Fox and Roach, a real estate firm that operates in greater Philadelphia. "It doesn't take a long time to understand what you're doing," Skyers says. "This product is easy to manage and easy to get a hold of. I like the ease of use."

It's a Triple Crown for Microsoft Operations Manager, which won by a fairly wide margin in a large field of competitors. ScriptLogic checks in as ISV winner in another victory for the Desktop Authority product.

Readers liked the big boys in this category. Operations Manager wins the Triple Crown in yet another category, this time in a field packed with 53 products. Another mega-vendor, Cisco, chimes in as ISV winner with Syslog Analyzer. HP, yet another monster player, scores with a preferred product. Readers also offered a long list of favorite products not included among this year's survey choices.

MKS Toolkit won its category handily and snatched a Triple Crown. Chris Hambleton, a
Bristol, England-based deputy engineering general manager for Zuken, a Japanese electronic and engineering design firm, passes on via e-mail a Toolkit success story: "Zuken started using MKS over 10 years ago in order to help with the transition of its Unix-based tools to the NT platform. This helped us to bring our Unix-based tools to the market on the PC platform more rapidly. This was originally used to port our VISULA suite of printed circuit board (PCB) design tools to the PC platform. It also helped us to introduce our Unix-trained developers more rapidly to NT and ease the transition to development on the PC platform. MKS is now also used in our Lightning suite of PCB design tools for the design of high-speed PCBs. MKS continues to be actively used in development and is a central part of the development environment on the PC platform."

Lightspeed's Total Traffic Control is one win away from a Triple Crown, racking up its second straight success this year. It narrowly beat Argent Guardian, with Network Instruments Observer also coming close. Interestingly, fully 10 percent of readers in this category wrote in a product that wasn't in our survey list.

Symantec's Altiris acquisition looks wiser all the time, and Asset Management suite helps buoy that outlook by taking home a Triple Crown. Altiris also scored a Preferred Product nod in the same category with Altiris Inventory Solution. We awarded an extra Preferred Product laurel because Novell and Altiris Inventory Solution finished in a dead heat for second place, and Numara was very close behind.

Its stock price might have taken a few hits in 2008, and it might be facing new competition from Microsoft, but VMware remains king of the Readers' Choice virtualization jungle. GSX easily won over Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to take the rare Triple Crown-ISV Winner honor. ESX, another VMware product, scored quite a few write-in votes as well.

Jared Beard, associate director of IT labs at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., notes one reason why he likes Triple Crown winner Workstation Edition: "Students can take environments with them at the end of the semester. It lets them take that VM processor hardware to a processor back home and continue the work. A lot of times when you're working on a PC at the end of the class, it's done. That machine is wiped, and it's gone. [Workstation Edition] gives you flexibility like you've never had before."

To be fair, our users seem to prefer Internet Explorer to non-Microsoft options, but Firefox so dominated the non-Microsoft choices that we didn't even bother awarding
Preferred Products in this category. For what it's worth, though, Netscape Navigator is still hanging on with about 3 percent of respondents.

Almost everybody's a winner in this category, but Symantec's Ghost Suite is the big winner, bringing home a Triple Crown and more than 50 percent of the vote. Count Auburn's Davis as a fan: "Ghost works for us and it works well," he says succinctly.

This was a real barn-burner, but Quest's suite hung on to nab a Triple Crown and just nip an Altiris application and two Acronis products. In this category, 10 percent of readers voted for "Other," showing how competitive the migration technology space is right now. Once again, we bestowed an extra Preferred Product award because the two Acronis products tied each other.

Desktop Authority was arguably the product of the Readers' Choice awards this year, stealing wins from incumbents in several categories. One caveat here, though: "Other" actually won the category with almost 19 percent of the vote.